Rasheed Wiggins was a man in love. After seven years into his relationship with Kimberly Holmes, he decided to make up for lost time and ask Kimberly to marry him.

They had known each other casually as students at Duke University but went their separate ways after graduation. Kimberly chased a career in television news while Rasheed pursued a business executive path and entrepreneurship. Both were driven.

About 11 p.m. the couple was startled by what sounded like fireworks outside the front of their home. Karen reached the front room before Steve as the two tried to identify the source of the sounds. “All of a sudden, the entire door blew in,” she recalls. “I saw a very tall figure with gray hair who just started shooting.”

Life really is about second chances, most especially when it comes to love. Todd Heiden and Joan Donnelly got their second chances two decades ago after they met when both worked for the Walt Disney World Company. What began in a sweet, romantic-comedy kind of way ended in tragedy, leaving a dozen-year-old wake that remains, for Todd, as intensely painful to discuss today as when it happened.  

The young couple had much in common, yet their personalities were charmingly dissimilar – Jeff was quiet and reserved while Sandee completed the bubbly and boisterous half of the duo. Just like their married name suggests, they were both indeed bright, professionally, and personally. They fit with and balanced each other perfectly.

As a Florida legislative political candidate, Allie Braswell’s focus was on bringing people with different perspectives together to find common ground. Braswell, 62, and an expert in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and building relationships, had no illusions that bringing people together would be easy. And it wasn’t. But it was a former state legislator from the other side of the aisle, who surprised Braswell after his cherished wife, Shellie-Ann, died unexpectedly in 2021.

“I really had to take a deep breath and sit with the uncomfortable.” That’s how Lori Bogan recalls the moments after the two-year rollercoaster ride that was her husband Matt’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis, his passing and the days and the myriad of unexpected experiences that followed.

College sweethearts Jeff and Tammy Roberts had planned to hit the road and travel across the country in their RV before Jeff’s life was taken in a workplace shooting in Orlando. She has since pursued a new chapter by relocating to her home state of Missouri to be with her children and precious grandson.

After 37 years together, Barry and Sara Brady’s life together ended with the fall that should never have happened. “I look back and now have a clearer understanding of just how overwhelmed I was about everything.” First there’s grief, sorrow, regrets and then realizing you have to start a new chapter.

As a glass-ceiling cracking journalist, Betty Rollin knew quite a lot about life and death. She was a hard-working, female broadcast reporter with NBC News who typified the now outdated descriptor “career girl,” a term that at age 87, she found amusing.

Grief comes and takes what it wants, when it wants. You have no say. That’s how Jess O’Neill explains trying to make sense of the nearly eight years after the sudden death of his fiancé Beshara Shiferawe in 2016.

Peter King is the quintessential eternal optimist. He is also charmingly philosophical. At the same time, Peter is a working journalist and therefore, he has always been a realist, accepting life’s hardest moments as well as new adventures, including love.